


That Man That Is Not Passion's Slave

by Epigone



Category: Hamlet - Shakespeare, Slings & Arrows
Genre: F/M, M/M, backstage drama, sort of Shakespeare slash?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-01-20
Updated: 2009-01-20
Packaged: 2017-10-30 14:05:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,088
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/332551
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Epigone/pseuds/Epigone
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>“. . . Even Gielgud dabbled in </i>Hamlet<i> homoeroticism. It’s not… that interesting a story.”</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	That Man That Is Not Passion's Slave

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Raven (singlecrow)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/singlecrow/gifts).



> **Warnings:** Spoilers for the pilot.  
>  **Disclaimer** : Only the original characters in here are mine (though I steal some things shamelessly from theatrical history). The rest I'm just borrowing.  
>  **Acknowledgments and Notes** : Written for [Raven](http://archiveofourown.org/users/singlecrow/pseuds/Raven)'s birthday, over at [Grim and Ancient](http://grimandancient.livejournal.com). Thanks to Malograntum Vitiorum for once again fielding my dumb-amateur questions at every turn, and for turning me on (ha ha ha, pun intended) to how "cope" signifies in Shakespeare; to [Petra](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Petra/pseuds/Petra) and [Sabine](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Sab/pseuds/Sab) for canon consultations; to [Abyssinia](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Abyssinia/pseuds/Abyssinia) for unwittingly planting the seed of this, eight months ago, by taking me to Stratford and letting me talk at her about Hamlet/Horatio; to the G.T.P. theater company for letting me hang out behind the scenes; and to [The Acrobat](http://archiveofourown.org/users/the_acrobat/pseuds/The%20Acrobat) for being a quick, perceptive beta. I couldn't have done this without them. Incidentally, I also couldn't have done it without Damien Rice, Campbell Scott & John Benjamin Hickey, Ben Carlson & Tom Rooney, and red wine. All of the original characters, radio stations, and theaters used herein are my own invention and are not intended to comment upon anything real (although sharp-eyed readers may notice allusions/tributes to the real).  
> PS, Montreal? Is in _Quebec_.
> 
> * * *

**EXCERPTED TRANSCRIPT OF 21/03/97 CRSN RADIO BROADCAST:**

**GRANDIS:** And we’re back with Oliver Welles, the artistic director of our very own New Burbage Festival, talking about an exciting upcoming season and his flagship production of _Hamlet_. Just nine weeks away, isn’t it, Oliver? With still a few crucial roles left to cast? How are you feeling about it?  
 **WELLES:** Actually fairly… sanguine, Stuart. You know: from this time forth, my thoughts be bloody, or be nothing worth.  
 **GRANDIS:** Now, your Hamlet is Geoffrey Tennant, with whom you’ve done a lot of work in the past. And regular theatregoers are also going to recognize your Ophelia, aren’t they? Because she’s— Ellen Fanshawe has in fact played opposite Tennant in a number of productions: they were your Romeo and Juliet, your Benedick and Beatrice, your—  
 **WELLES:** Yes, yes.  
 **GRANDIS:** What do you think that, that dynamic, that _chemistry_ , is going to do for your _Hamlet_?  
 **WELLES:** I think they’re going to do great work, together and apart. As they always do. But frankly I don’t really think that how Hamlet and Ophelia get on is, in itself, essential to the play.  
 **GRANDIS:** _Hamlet_ isn’t exactly _Romeo and Juliet_ , you’re saying.  
 **WELLES:** The theory has been advanced.  
 **GRANDIS** [ _laughing_ ] **:** Well, can you let us in on any other surprises you have in store for us with this play? For example, have you cast—  
 **WELLES:** I think if it comes off right, the entire play will be a surprise. That’s what you always hope for, with any play but with _Hamlet_ in particular… that when your man stands up and says, “To be or not to be,” there’s still something revelatory about it, for the people listening… and for you, and for your Hamlet. That you all learn something new as it happens. And that’s why it’s such a difficult play to direct.  
 **GRANDIS:** Because you can’t plan a surprise?  
 **WELLES:** Because you can’t _expect_ one. You can certainly try to plan one, to make it more likely. You can provide the right conditions—like an experiment done right, done rigorously. That’s what we’re in the process of doing now, as we finish casting and begin rehearsing. So, no, I can’t tell you what’s going to happen, but yes, I think— yes, I’m planning some surprises. I hope you’ll see them when we open. [. . .]

***

It would have been more satisfying if Geoffrey could have been waiting in the wings when Oliver came off the air. Radio stations not lending themselves so well to dramatic gestures, though, he settles for the theater afterward, for lying in wait in the greenroom, so that when he hears Oliver’s familiar tread approaching, he erupts into the hallway.

“I don’t much like surprises,” he says.

Oliver doesn’t even break his stride. “Actually I have some phone calls to make on that subject, so—”

“I really don’t, Oliver,” says Geoffrey darkly. 

Oliver pauses, looks him up and down, and quirks his mouth.

“If that’s true, you chose the wrong career,” he says. Of course he must know that Geoffrey wants him to disclaim that— _and you obviously didn’t_ —and so of course he doesn’t.

“Well,” says Geoffrey at length. He leans back against the wall, elbows out to the sides, and says, “I did make love to this employment.” 

He raises his head a little, so that Oliver has an unobscured view of the reddening welt that Ellen stamped there fifteen minutes ago. Since he and Ellen started their own preliminary private rehearsals, he’s been in a near-constant state of just-got-laid that, besides being very nice on its own merits, is useful because it means he can always count on eliciting some kind of reaction from Oliver. It doesn’t matter what kind of reaction; he can’t predict which days it’ll amuse Oliver, which days it’ll actually inspire him directorially, and which days he’ll end by drinking himself stupid in the theater bar. It just matters that Geoffrey knows there’s still, always, a receptive audience watching.

For once, Oliver disappoints. This time, he only smiles, abstracted, as if he barely heard, and says, “I want to bring in someone good for Claudius.”

“Well, yes,” says Geoffrey drily; “I suppose it would help if we had one good actor in the bunch.”

“You know what I mean. After this _Hamlet_ has gone off, you and Ellen can be the next Burton and Taylor if that’s what you want—I have no idea why you’d want that, but it’s your funeral—but you’re not yet. If nobody comes to the play, nobody knows any better. If we get a name for Claudius, we’ll get them through the doors.” Oliver pauses. “I want to bring in Oscar Douglas.”

“ _That_ ’s your surprise?”

Oliver spreads his hands, still smiling that faraway smile. “It’s a surprise.”

Geoffrey considers this for a moment, turning it in his mind like a glass to observe how it reflects the light from every angle. In the end, he can only see it one way, and he says, testily, testing it out: “I don’t like Douglas.”

“I know. I want him.” 

When Oliver gets like this, there’s no use arguing with him. He puts up the resistance of a wall: too high to see over, too broad to maneuver around, and too sheer to be reduced to a single point of contrariness.

Changing tacks, Geoffrey says, “Then I want to import our Horatio, too.”

Oliver cocks his head, his focus visibly sharpening. “You have someone in mind?”

He’s obviously intrigued. For a moment Geoffrey balks, misgiving rising in him. Before New Burbage, with other directors, he always knew where he stood; if he’d tried something like this with them, to a man they would have laughed at him, the callow young romantic hero, and said, “I hadn’t realized this was a _negotiation_.” But Oliver enters into this gleefully, as if eager to complicate the process with personalities. It worries Geoffrey, briefly, and then he puts it aside, because in the end he likes this too, likes this game of trying to extrapolate motivations. It’s what makes him good at what he does.

“Ben Ross,” he says.

It takes Oliver a few seconds. “—Ben Ross, Ben Ross whose Hamlet you played Horatio to in some godforsaken—”

“—in Ottawa,” says Geoffrey patiently. “A few years back. Yes.”

Oliver has the look of a man doing some very complicated mathematics in his head. “You were wasted there,” he says. “Moreover, I didn’t like his Hamlet.”

Geoffrey controls his wince. He’d hoped that this one kindness might be allowed them, that a forgettable _Hamlet_ might actually be forgotten. Instead it seems to recur at the worst moments, like a tic, like a speech impediment—

“It was,” he says, with dignity for both their sakes, his and Ben’s, “very earnest—”

“It was _earnest_?” Oliver cries.

“All right,” says Geoffrey uncomfortably, “and maybe he sometimes tended to stutter on the soliloquies; he was too aware of how big the play was, he thought about it too much—”

“Oh for Chrissake Geoffrey,” says Oliver, a little shrilly (Geoffrey can’t tell if it’s with horror or with a strange, self-satisfied kind of triumph), “I know he’s your friend and I’m sure you went at it like rabbits back at Wittenberg, in those halcyon days Before the Common Ellen, but _honestly_. It was… dispassionate. He was a _dispassionate Hamlet_.”

“Possibly,” says Geoffrey, distracted, still trying to decode that note in Oliver’s voice. “It wasn’t the role for him.”

“And you think Horatio is?”

“Yes,” says Geoffrey. He doesn’t even have to consider the answer, but for Oliver’s benefit he goes through the motions. “A measured man, who thinks about the size of the whole—yes. He was born to play Horatio.”

“All right,” says Oliver, as if a switch has been flipped. “I get Douglas, you get Ross. That’s fair, isn’t it?”

With Oliver’s wall suddenly gone, Geoffrey no longer has any sense of the shape of what they’re doing. “Why do I feel as though I’ve missed some fine print somewhere? As though I’ll meet Mephistopheles in some dark alley one of these nights and my heels will kick at heaven?”

Oliver laughs and puts a warm hand on his shoulder. “I’m not putting on that kind of play,” he says, but his voice isn’t as warm. Then he’s pressing past in the narrow space of the hallway, heading for his office. 

“By the way,” says Geoffrey to his back, as if in passing, “we didn’t. Ben and I. When we were at W— at York.”

Oliver slows but doesn’t stop, doesn’t turn. He speaks over his shoulder, without looking.

“Oh, that’s right, I forgot, because of course there _was_ no time before Ellen. ‘Did my heart love till now? Forswear it, sight!’” He barks a laugh. “A word of warning: people who say that tend to end up dead. They also end up very boring. And I don't want a boring _Hamlet_ , Geoffrey. That's just above Oedipal on the list of _Hamlet_ s I will not do: the one that Stuart Grandis seems to want, where Ophelia and Hamlet are unambiguously, heteronormatively in love right up until the point where he starts sexually harassing her.” His voice, drifting down the long claustrophobic space, is impossibly amplified, unnervingly loud. “I’m not putting on _that_ kind of play either, Geoffrey.”

***

Although Geoffrey moved in with Ellen not so long ago, they still both spend most of their waking hours at New Burbage. With Oliver, who might actually live in the theater, they’re already waiting in the rehearsal room as everyone else files in for the first table read.

There’s Brian, pathologically early as always, with whom Geoffrey exchanges grudging nods across the room. Brian is a good actor, maybe great someday, and they’re still stalking each other around the edges of rooms like apex predators in competition. There’s a friendly little flurry of company actors—Reynaldo, Osric, Bernardo, Marcellus, Rosencrantz, players, soldiers—chattering among themselves, some of them getting their first cracks at speaking roles. There’s Owen Vaughan, Polonius, who’s apparently semi-famous from some science-fiction television show where he shape-shifts, or is immortal, or glows in the dark, or whatever those people do. There’s Barbara, their Gertrude, whom Ellen greets warmly for both of them (Geoffrey likes her just as well, but already he’s trying to distance himself, to be as anti-Oedipal as possible). And Oscar Douglas closely following—the blowhard, trying to upstage his own queen. Geoffrey doesn’t need a method motive to be cold with him.

And then there’s Ben. The first thing Geoffrey notices is his receding hairline, and he realizes with a shock that he hasn’t seen Ben in several years. The last time, Geoffrey was visiting Montreal and they got very drunk after Ben’s last performance as Le Bret in a long-running French-language production of _Cyrano de Bergerac_. (Ben _had_ been inspired in that role, which is another reason Geoffrey knows he’ll be a good Horatio.) That last time, Ben was still in makeup and the remnants of his costume, still a little stagy and high on curtain calls. All night he spoke in fluid, run-together French, like a man in melt. But now, in street clothes, his face pinked with winter wind, he comes through the door easily, loosely, with none of Vaughan or Douglas’s fanfare, not like an imported actor but like a man who belongs anywhere he is. Quietly, self-effacingly present. Geoffrey has missed that, and him.

For the first time, Geoffrey gets out of his chair. He meets Ben halfway between the table and the door, takes him by both elbows and holds him there.

“Ben,” he says, grinning foolishly. All he can think to say, in the moment, is “Good morning. Welcome to New Burbage.” And then, in a louder voice for the benefit of the rest of the room: “We’ll teach you to drink deep ere you depart.”

“I think I’ve already had that lesson,” says Ben, but also in a public voice. He ducks his head, probably feeling the gaze of everyone else in the room—he’s not used to that, the way Geoffrey is. Then he looks back up, only at Geoffrey, and says, “You’re just the same.” He’s very flushed now, from the cold outside or maybe from the cast’s scrutiny.

Geoffrey can feel Ellen approaching behind him, and in an overflow of general bonhomie he throws out an arm to include her.

“Ben, this is Ellen. Our Ophelia. Although mostly mine in practice.”

She slips in under his out-flung arm and shakes hands with Ben. “I’ve heard a lot about you.”

“Likewise,” says Ben, his color precipitously dropping. That’s something Geoffrey has always resented a little about him, how he can turn off emotion, tamp it down, no matter what’s working against him: alcohol, attraction, applause, or just the pleasure of a much-deferred reunion.

There’s a silence among them for a moment, into which Geoffrey breaks eagerly: “Listen, Oliver hates chatter at readings, too much impinging on the sound of his own voice, but afterward— do you have a place to stay yet? Stay with us.”

Ben looks from him to Ellen and back again. “With—” He pauses. At length, he says, “The theater’s putting me up, actually.”

“I’ve seen the kind of temporary housing New Burbage provides,” says Geoffrey, “and it’s more like putting you down. Don’t be a martyr. It doesn’t suit your role. Draw thy breath in pain a while and stay with us.”

“Don’t harass him, Geoffrey,” says Ellen abruptly, and when he turns to tell her that he never _harasses_ people, he just has a convincing grasp of rhetoric, she gives him a look that says she knows better. And she does. “Let him stay where he wants. If you weren’t such a good lay, I wouldn’t be able to stand staying with you either.” And with a crooked smile at him and a sympathetic look at Ben, she leaves them for the table.

“Listen,” says Ben in an undertone, watching her go. “I didn’t know you were living together. I assumed it was serious when you mentioned her name in letters, but I didn’t— I mean, this move-in must be recent, because it never came up. And that’s… strange enough, that trial period, without some stranger in the house.”

“You’re not a stranger,” Geoffrey begins, but that’s when Oliver calls, too cheerily, “Time to wrap up the Wittenberg reunion, boys, we do still have to put on a show for the subscribers!” 

And then they’re at the table with _Hamlet_ before them, and everything that Geoffrey is feeling gets subsumed in that, purely and seamlessly, as it always does. Fuck, he loves this play. He loves its fearless interrogation of the void from the very first line, its tenantless graves and disasters for the son. His Horatio saying, clear and silver as a bell in the cold of the Danish court, “Hail to your lordship!”, and the meeting of their eyes as Hamlet says, “And what make you from Wittenberg, Horatio?” His Ophelia teasing Laertes, the pink tip of her tongue between her lips as she traces the primrose path of dalliance, and the way she lifts her face across the table to Geoffrey as she says, “So please you, something touching the Lord Hamlet,” the lilt of her voice itself a kind of caress.

By the time Maria calls for a fifteen-minute break, his heart is thumping and his face is hot. He’s emptied out the pitcher of water on the table and his throat’s still dry. But Oliver ignores Maria and has them plough ahead into another whole act of it, a blur that ends with Ophelia’s madness and her eyes on him as she sings “Young men will do’t, if they come to’t” and Gertrude’s queerly picturesque drowning speech and the long purples that liberal shepherds give a grosser name. By the time Oliver finally says, at the end of Act Four, “Now _this_ is where I want the intermission and this is where you can all take fifteen,” Geoffrey’s so hard it hurts.

Ben's the only one watching as they leave, so Geoffrey doesn’t even bother with propriety. He doesn’t give Ellen a head start to her dressing room, and the only reason he shuts the door is that he’s got her pushed up against it. She’s wearing sensible twentieth-century-woman clothes, trousers and a button-up shirt, but she’s his Ophelia, drenched and drowning, and her clothes spread wide for him, he unbuttons her down and up and _in_ , and oh, fuck, Hamlet got one thing wrong, there is certainly something there.

As if she knows his thoughts, against his neck Ellen says, pantingly, laughingly, “Something touching the Lord Hamlet?” He shudders and swirls in the first riffles of pleasure, feeling the current’s tug but keeping briefly afloat. Until the moment he goes under with her (and over the top, and under and over and under in a endless weaving together), there’s a part of him still fighting for clarity. He keeps his head above water as he’s borne along, trying to catch sight of something onshore that always just eludes him.

***

Nothing much changes, really, after Ben arrives. For a while there doesn’t seem to be a space for him, between endless line readings and costume fittings and Ellen. Over the course of the next week, the closest Geoffrey and Ben get to a private conversation is the first time they run Three-Two for Oliver. That _is_ a private conversation of a kind, a relearning of the language they shared in university and then for a little while in Ottawa—where to make eye contact, when to smile, where personal space is and when it’s right to invade it. Geoffrey has never been very good at that part, the holding back, and Oliver has never been the ideal teacher. With Ben he relearns it, how sometimes not to look, not to smile, not to touch is more intimate. He finds, too, that sometimes the more people watching their scenes together, the more private it seems, the more they’re on the inside and everyone else is on the outside.

Still, they spend a week only speaking to each other as Hamlet and Horatio. Then comes the day when they spend a whole morning on their first rehearsal of Five-One. Oliver’s obsessing over every syllable the First Clown utters, while Ophelia invisibly molders in the crawlspace (Ellen sitting in the audience miles away), and Geoffrey decides to give Ben a little more nonverbal material in this scene and starts playing up the Hamlet-Horatio alliance against the First Clown. Soon they’re both exchanging long-suffering sighs and winks and raised eyebrows, grinning at each other across the grave. Then Oliver notices and tells them off for not appreciating “the central _gravity_ of this confrontation.” That only gives them another clown against whom to align themselves, so Geoffrey can say, “Ah, dost thou think _Newton_ looked o’ this fashion i’ the earth?” and rely on Ben’s flawless straight-man “E’en so.” At which point Oliver, in a towering rage, and to Maria’s great distress, calls an end to the whole bloody rehearsal and tells Geoffrey to come to his office for some private notes. As Geoffrey moves to follow Oliver out, Ben pulls a guilty-schoolboy face at him and says in a low voice, “Maybe we can do something later today?” Geoffrey nods and has forgotten it entirely by the time he gets to Oliver’s office. Not because he has no genuine intention of following through, but because once off the stage it’s hard to remember how to be Geoffrey and Ben again.

Afterward, he goes home, where Ellen has deli sandwiches waiting for lunch. 

“I’m hungrier than a sandwich,” he says, still a little petulant from Oliver’s dressing-down.

Ellen puts her arms around his neck from behind and says, “I know. That’s why I thought we shouldn’t put too much on our stomachs.”

“Ah,” says Geoffrey, and finishes quickly. They go upstairs and make love, and fall asleep in the early afternoon, and wake up together and make love again, and fall asleep again, the whole day free and theirs.

The next time Geoffrey wakes, they’re not so synchronized. Ellen sleeps deeply on, uncovered, unfurled from the bedsheets. It’s early evening, the drawn curtains glowing greenish in the late light filtered through the leaves outside the window, the way the air must look in the moments before a tornado touches down. Then the doorbell rings again, the sound that first stirred him vaguely out of sleep. He gets out of bed, wraps himself halfheartedly in one of the loose sheets, and goes downstairs.

In the entrance hall, still groggy, he puts his forehead against the peephole of the door without bothering to look, and asks, “Who?”

Ben’s voice says, “Me. Sorry. I waited a while and then thought I’d just come—”

Geoffrey swings the door open, following it with his body, so that he ends up on the stoop with Ben. The sheet slips lower around his hips. Ben looks at him, unruffled.

“Not much has changed since university,” he observes mildly. “That used to terrify first-years.”

Geoffrey makes a face at him and beckons him in. Ben precedes him into the living room, where he takes an armchair and Geoffrey takes the floor, his back against the wall.

“On the contrary,” says Geoffrey, picking up the conversation, “many things have changed since university. Now when I have sex multiple times in a day, it’s with the same person.”

Ben smiles slightly, in that polite way he has of acknowledging every joke, however tangential.

“Should I go?” he asks.

“We’ve reached intermission,” says Geoffrey.

Ben smiles again. A kind of reflex, involuntary; he smiles the way he used to stammer sometimes. He starts to say something, doesn’t manage it, and then settles for “You didn’t get in too much trouble for this morning?”

Geoffrey shrugs and laughs. “The thing about Oliver is, he brings you into his office under the pretext of notes in order to ream you out, and then he can’t help himself and actually gives you reams of notes.”

“Did he—” Ben shakes his head and starts again. Geoffrey notices he’s holding onto the arms of the chair. “He didn’t— did he happen to say anything that would be helpful to me, in that scene? Or for the play in general? Any Horatio character notes in passing?”

“Sorry,” says Geoffrey, shaking his head. “Most of it wasn’t even particularly helpful to me. I’m taking on the longest speaking part Shakespeare ever wrote, and Oliver’s hung up on the First Clown, who appears in one scene. He’s a maniac about Five-One. He’s convinced it’s the key to the play. He wants it to be the one scene where someone overshadows me—you know, it’s a _metaphor_ ,” he drops into his much-exercised Oliver impression, “the shadow of death, the gravedigger as the absolute knave even Hamlet can’t outwit. So what’s important to Oliver is that the Clown be compelling, and I’m important only as far as my reaction shots go.” He mugs an exaggerated expression of terror. “The banter has to feel desperate, manic, in deadly earnest—joking to stave off the inevitable. _You_ know. Not a novel interpretation, but a solid one.”

“So your only objection, really, is that you’re getting upstaged _on the director’s instructions_ ,” says Ben. “You really haven’t changed, you know.” He clears his throat, and clarifies, “Not a criticism.”

“I know,” says Geoffrey, but really, after so long away from it, he finds Ben’s tendency to tell the simple truth a little uncomfortable, a little uncanny. “No, you’re right. And Oliver’s right. It’s a scene where the gravedigger ought to have the upper hand.” He clears his throat too, catching it like a yawn, and says, “Someone once told me that it’s been calculated, God knows how, that in playing Hamlet—in playing him _right_ , presumably—you expend an amount of energy equivalent to that of a man digging a ditch for eight hours.”

“You do look tired,” says Ben. Again that direct look, awkwardly honest.

Geoffrey shrugs it off. “You’d be surprised how much of that energy you expend satisfying your Ophelia. She wouldn’t last a day in a nunnery.”

Again that stammer of a smile from Ben. And then, slowly, he says, “That’s all Oliver said? In his notes?”

“Well, I don’t think he knows much about Ophelia’s sexual appetite—we’re not putting on _that_ kind of _Hamlet_ , Ben—” He stops; for a moment there, Ben looked almost distressed. “What? Yes, that was all, about the Clown. What?”

“No, just, I wondered,” says Ben, with painstaking evenness. “I. The private notes. Sometimes when Oliver Welles….” He stops. He seems to resign himself to something, taking his hands from the arms of the chair and putting them, palms up, in his lap. An offering. “It’s just that when I was his Demetrius, that time when you introduced us, once or twice I had private notes in his office and….”

Geoffrey’s first wild impulse is to laugh, though he suspects he shouldn’t. His second is to hit Ben, or maybe to go find Oliver and hit him, and he _knows_ he shouldn’t do that. Especially since he can’t figure out why he wants to, and he’s suspicious of any action for which he can’t identify a motive.

Finally, carefully, he says, “Fuck, Ben, I’ve known him a long time, I know that happens. It just doesn’t happen with me.”

For the first time Ben stops looking at him, and looks at his open hands.

“It’s not still—” Geoffrey begins to ask.

“God, no,” says Ben, and he for one is laughing. “I was younger and better-looking then. It was just something to do, while we... waited. I doubt he even remembers me.”

“I think he does.” For some reason Geoffrey still wants to hit him, or topple him out of that chair. He settles for saying--a little flare of cruelty he didn’t know he had in him until it lit up--“He didn’t like your _Hamlet_.”

“Neither did I,” says Ben, to his hands.

After a while, Geoffrey says, “Sorry. That was a shitty thing to say. It’s just that you’re not the first person to have thought it, and since I got Hamlet the assumption’s started to feel a little more, you know, invidious.”

“Also incestuous,” says Ben, a sly little grin touching his face, the same one he wore this morning as they teased Oliver. “I mean, nailing your director is uncomfortably close to nailing your father’s ghost, in a way.”

Geoffrey is aware that Ben’s consciously lightening the mood, steering them away from uncertain ground. And at some point he wants to know what’s there, wants to map that particular undiscovered country, but for now he goes along with it, because he _is_ tired, from digging through _Hamlet_ and from loving Ellen as much as he does and from remembering when not to touch. He laughs.

“Honestly, if we’re going to go that route, I’d much rather we just convince Oliver to let us do the Oedipal interpretation after all.”

Ben’s tone is airy, casual. “Or, if we’re going to be subtextual, why not go all the way and let Hamlet be in love with Horatio?”

The room gets quiet, hushed with waiting. That is the question. And Geoffrey, unmanned, his muscles rubbery, made a coward by something much less admirable than conscience, follows the prince of Denmark in this, too; he defers the question. Not here, not now. He’s not ready to answer in the first act.

“It’s been done,” he says, just as lightly as Ben. “That twenties film with the Danish actress, for one. Even Gielgud dabbled in _Hamlet_ homoeroticism. It’s not… that interesting a story.”

That’s when Ellen comes into the room, yawning, tousled, wrapped in a robe. She takes Ben’s presence with perfect equanimity, smiling at him familiarly. (Geoffrey remembers how good Ben has been in Ophelia’s mad scenes, how believably solicitous and dismayed at her sexual advances, how perfect a stand-in for the absent brother.) She crosses to Geoffrey, slipping a hand beneath his sheet and onto his bare shoulder. A frisson of static passes between them. He thinks he’ll make some excuse, get Ben out, take her upstairs again.

“Are you hungry, Ben?” asks Ellen. “Stay over for dinner. I’m a terrible cook, but Geoffrey isn’t.” 

The funny thing is, in all the time he’s known them separately, through the respective orgies of university—where he brought half the population of Toronto to his bed in the apartment that he and Ben shared for two years—and New Burbage—where it was always, only, Ellen—he’s never felt a pang of self-consciousness in front of either of them. But here, with Ellen’s hand resting under the sheet, and Ben saying yes, he’ll stay—here, he feels burningly exposed. He gets up, leaving them to talk amongst themselves, and goes upstairs alone to put on some clothes.

***

From then on everything gathers momentum, barreling toward the precipice of opening night, streaked by speed. In the mornings, Geoffrey and Ellen sneak into the theater early with a key they shouldn’t technically have (these days no one can refuse them anything), and like teenagers make love beneath the stage, slowly, lingeringly, eyes open in the murk watching the miracle of each other moving. In the evenings, Ben joins them in the bar, and he and Geoffrey compete to tell Ellen the most outrageous university stories. In the wee hours, the only one still sober, Ben drives them home across town, through the nights dark and raw and stirring into spring.

In between, their days are all the play. Geoffrey is constantly, deliriously happy, the kind of syncopated happiness that makes you drop a heartbeat here and there. He’s in love with everyone. He’s in love with Oliver, who never touches him during private note sessions but might as well, who wantonly scrawls all over his script till Geoffrey can feel the press of the pen. Ellen, whom Geoffrey touches as much as possible: his head in her lap at _The Mouse-trap_ , his fingers hitching the dress up her thigh as he manhandles her in their confrontation scene. Ben, who plays every Hamlet-Horatio conversation like a piece of choreography from a larger movement, so that when together they mock Osric or interrogate the First Clown, they dance circles around them. (After the rehearsal where they finally get Five-One just right, Oliver says so only Geoffrey can hear, “He _is_ a good Horatio.”) Even Brian, who’s always been a better fencer than Geoffrey and who makes secret touches on him in fight practice just to prove he can; even Barbara, whose Gertrude melts him with a moment of sympathy in her chambers, screw Oliver and his Oedipus aversion. Hell, Geoffrey would be in love with egregious Oscar Douglas if he hadn’t realized that Oliver knew what he was doing with his casting, and that they do a better play when Hamlet really does hate Claudius.

And like the river they can faintly hear beyond the sound of the streets, they plunge forward in thaw, toward the moment of opening. Until there are no more rehearsals left; until it’s the night before.

Geoffrey, Ellen, and Ben stay at the bar until even Brian has wobbled off to bed somewhere. Ellen doesn’t drink much, as is her custom on the night before opening, and as usual Ben drinks only enough to be social. Geoffrey, though, has built up such a tolerance to the _feeling_ of being drunk that he doesn’t notice until long after the fact that he really is, physically, quite drunk. For a while he makes Ellen run lines with him, kissing her between iambs, and then Ben, and then Ellen again, until Ellen removes his hands from her hips and holds his face with the tips of her fingers.

“Geoffrey,” she says, “you are brilliant, but you’re insane.”

“I’ll drink to that,” says Ben, but he hasn’t had a drink in a while.

“My uncle-father and aunt-mother are deceived,” says Geoffrey.

“And I love you,” continues Ellen, “but I have to go to bed.” She stands up out of their booth, then pauses. “Ben?”

Ben isn't drunk, but he moves with a strange kind of heaviness, making as if to get up and follow her. “I’ll get my car.”

She waves him off. “No, don’t bother. Oliver’s working late in his office; I’ll bully him into giving me a ride. I was only going to say—make sure _he_ gets home all right.” She runs a hand through Geoffrey’s hair. “And that he doesn’t do too much Bard-butchering in the meantime.”

“I have never in my life,” says Geoffrey with great dignity, “butchered William Shakeshpeare.”

“I do love you,” she says, “but you are _insane_. I’ll see you tomorrow, Ben.” And she goes.

Geoffrey looks after her for a while, long after the bar door has closed between them. The door doesn’t quite register in his fogged brain. After a while, he rouses himself and slides around to sit next to Ben.

“Horatio,” he says companionably, “thou art e'en as just a man as e'er my conversation coped withal." _Cope_ , he recalls, is a multivalent word, or at least it was when that line was written. Archaic: to meet someone. Also archaic: to fight with someone (to play a match). To endure a difficult situation. To shape two pieces so that they dovetail (to match). And, for Shakespeare: a sexual euphemism. He’s about to deliver this lecture to Ben when he notices that the seat beside him is empty. Ben is standing now.

"We have to let them close up the bar," he says, without much conviction.

"I haven’t finished rehearsing," says Geoffrey.

"Geoff, you could do this play in your sleep. Which is probably what you’ll end up doing tomorrow if we don’t go to bed soon."

Ignoring this logic, Geoffrey says, "We’ll find another space." He gets to his feet, heavy with his drink, then almost falls back down. Ben hauls him up by one arm, obviously thinking he staggered from inebriation rather than inspiration. "Oliver’s office!"

Ben stares at him, but Geoffrey can see it in his face: it appeals to him, too. And so he doesn’t resist; he half-supports, half-follows Geoffrey out, through the bowels of the theater and down the hall to Oliver’s office. The lights are off—Geoffrey flicks them on with a flourish—but Oliver couldn’t have left much more than five minutes ago. The air fairly prickles with the scent of those damned mints of his, and he left a stack of playbills on his desk, with Geoffrey standing in silhouette on every cover. Geoffrey has the curious, exciting sensation of being an intruder who is expected.

Ben pulls out Oliver’s chair and slides into it. Sitting there, loose and slouched, he looks at Geoffrey sidelong with a smile tugging his face into a new shape. He has to be feeling it too.

“Horatio,” Geoffrey says again, a kind of urging upwelling in him, “thou art e'en as just a man as e'er my conversation coped withal."

Ben drops his eyes to the desk, with its sheaf of Geoffreys like a hall of mirrors. "O, my dear lord—" he says, Horatio resisting the compliment.

Geoffrey comes in over him, the second part of the harmony: "Nay, do not think I flatter; / For what advancement may I hope from thee / That no revenue hast but thy good spirits, / To feed and clothe thee? Why should the poor be flatter'd? / No, let the candied tongue lick absurd pomp, / And crook the pregnant hinges of the knee / Where thrift may follow fawning." The heat rises in him and he follows it up, his voice like smoke finding the highest point. "Dost thou hear?" he says to Ben. "Since my dear soul was mistress of her choice / And could of men distinguish, her election / Hath seal'd thee for herself—"

“O, my dear lord,” murmurs Ben, his head still down, angled slightly away from Geoffrey.

Geoffrey pauses, but doesn’t lose sight of it. “No,” he says, “that’s not your line here.” He steps closer, takes hold of the chair arms, and swivels it so that Ben is facing him straight on. “Ben,” he says, and Ben looks up, his face suffused. “Never interrupt iambic pentameter. For thou hast been / As one, in suffering all, that suffers nothing, / A man that fortune's buffets and rewards / Hast ta'en with equal thanks: and”—Ben hasn’t been drinking, Geoffrey thinks vaguely, but he looks like all the blood in his body has surged to his face—“blest are those / Whose blood and judgment are so well commingled, / That they are not a pipe”—wildly, whirlingly, he is thinking, _'Sblood, do you think I am easier to be played on than a pipe?_ , the two speeches colliding, the play converging on him, _you would seem to know my stops; you would pluck out the heart of my mystery; you would sound me from my lowest note to the top of my compass_ —“for fortune's finger / To sound what stop—” and Ben stands up, into the circle of Geoffrey’s body, and kisses him hard. His hands come up around Geoffrey’s head, his thumbs sliding along the jaw to curl up behind the ears. A perfect coping: two pieces fitted. In the play, given a pipe, Guildenstern protests, “I know no touch of it, my lord”; Horatio, however, has had a thorough and modern education in the hallowed halls of Germany (centuries before Darren Nichols ever went and ruined it). And Ben, well, Ben clearly hasn’t been wasting away in Montreal. He knows every touch of it. 

Ben’s mouth comes around the side and feeds the cue into Geoffrey’s ear. “To sound what stop she please. Give me that man / That is not passion's slave, and I will wear him..."

They finish together: "...in my heart’s core, ay, in my heart of heart, / As I do thee."

When they were in Ottawa, Geoffrey remembers. When they were young in Ottawa, this was one of the few speeches that Ben never flubbed. 

Geoffrey stumbles back a step, and Oliver’s desk hits him in the backs of his thighs. Ben keeps going, pushing him up and over the edge of the desk, sending playbills in all directions. Geoffrey feels the recitation as a shot straight to the pleasure center, as if someone has skimmed off his scalp and unsheathed him. They say the brain itself feels nothing physically—

Ellen said that, after he told her that playing Benedick to her Beatrice was like having an orgasm in his skull, an endless reverberation chamber. Smiling, she said, "They say you can’t feel pain in your brain, there aren’t any receptors, so I’m guessing you can’t actually feel an orgasm there either."

"That’s only because ‘they’ have their heads so far up their _asses_ that nothing can touch ’em," said Geoffrey, and set about persuading her.

—They’re going up and over the edge together, he and Ben, and at the last moment he digs in his heels. He puts his knee into Ben’s chest, and gently but very firmly pushes him off.

To his credit, Ben doesn’t react like an actor: he doesn’t make a scene. As soon as he takes a step back and gets a look at Geoffrey’s face, he knows. He sits down, and they face each other, Geoffrey poised on the edge of the desk and Ben sunk in the chair.

"Something too much of this," says Ben, with only a hint of a question behind it.

"We can’t," says Geoffrey. "I can’t."

Ben nods, looking somewhere in the vicinity of the desk drawers. After a while, he asks, "Do you need a ride home?"

"No," says Geoffrey, and before he can change his mind he gets off the desk. "I’ll... stay over here. Don’t worry about it. I’ve done it before. Once or twice when Ellen and I—" He looks at Ben one more time. "I can’t fuck this up," he says simply, wretchedly.

Ben nods again, just a dip of the head.

"Turn off the lights when you leave?" says Geoffrey, and doesn’t stay to hear an answer. It doesn’t matter; some niggling part of his brain, something he needs to examine closely when he’s sober, whispers to him that Oliver knew they’d come here for this.

He goes to the storage room and collapses on the sofa in the dark. He lies there, eyes open, expecting to wait interminable hours until the morning. But he must be more heartless, or drunker, than he’d thought. He sleeps almost immediately. He only wakes, washed up on the other side dazed and sore like a shipwreck victim, when Nahum opens the door.

They regard each other for a moment. Then Nahum gives him a slow grin of commiseration and says, "In Nigeria, after my theater closed, we put on plays in a tent. Almost every night it rained, and the wind howled, and we were... resigned."

Geoffrey smiles back, but even that small movement hurts.

"You’re trying to say... any port in a storm?"

"No," says Nahum. "I am saying what we used to say about that theater: it will blow over."

Geoffrey coughs on a laugh. "It really, really won’t," he says, swinging his legs around and sitting up with a grimace. "Anyway, at least tonight is opening night. Whatever else is fucked up, there’s always opening." He rubs a hand over his face and asks, "Do you know if Ellen’s in yet?"

Nahum shakes his head. "When she is, I shouldn’t tell her where you are?"

"No, no," says Geoffrey. "Hours till opening and a couch provided for us—by all means, tell her exactly where I am." He raises his head and looks at Nahum. "Have you heard that Ophelia joke?"

"I have heard many," says Nahum, patient.

“A critic interviews an old actor, well into his Lear years, who once was famous for his Hamlet. ‘In your interpretation, Mr. Smith, does Hamlet sleep with Ophelia?’” Geoffrey smiles tiredly. “The actor answers, ‘Almost invariably.’”

***

After that, there’s no need to say a word to Ben again if he doesn’t want to. Twelve hours later they open, and if Hamlet has almost no rapport with his Horatio, then that’s no great matter. It’s been done before, maybe it’s just their take on Hamlet’s complete isolation, and anyway it’s likely that no one even notices in the glare of the production’s brilliance.

Because it _is_ brilliant; he knows. This is the longest part Shakespeare ever wrote in the longest play he ever wrote, more than ten thousand words’ worth, but what Geoffrey hears as he walks the stage that night is the horror of the roar of silence beneath the speeches, like the sound of a distant sea. It’s the most profoundly terrifying thing he’s ever felt, and he knows he’s _got_ it. At the end, after the burst of Norwegian ordnance, the theater stands quiet for nearly a minute. Backstage, Geoffrey looks around, and no one is concerned. They all know that the audience is simply obeying Hamlet’s last command. They all feel, as he does, the beautiful stillness of desolation, the kind you get at the end of _The Waste Land_ when you come to know what the thunder said: He who was living is now dead… shantih shantih shantih, the peace which passeth understanding. Into which applause finally drops like a stone, spreading ripples.

Afterward, as soon as they’ve been at the party long enough to be polite, Geoffrey hauls Ellen and Oliver out into the cold, clear, echoing streets. They yell fit to wake the dead, and still don’t fill it up. The next night they do it all over again, and still he doesn’t have to talk to Ben. Then it’s intermission on the third night, and as usual he goes straight from the stage to Ellen’s dressing room.

Instead of her, Ben is there. He’s sitting in her chair, facing the door. Geoffrey comes in, and Ben must see him even before he sees himself, a flash of his own startled face in the mirror over the table. He can’t just turn around and pretend he never came.

“Where’s Ellen?” he asks.

“A couple of private notes in Oliver’s office,” says Ben.

“When she gets back, tell her to meet me in my dressing room,” says Geoffrey. He turns to go.

“It’d be easier to wait here,” says Ben, almost apologetically. “She’ll be back in five.”

“She told you that?” asks Geoffrey, over his shoulder.

Ben makes a negative noise. “Oliver. As they were going I asked her if she’d mind if I waited for you in here, and Oliver said no, go ahead. He said we’d better confer on how to liven up the Hamlet-Horatio scenes out there, because… ‘their utter tedium lately hasn’t escaped me.’” His Oliver impression is getting quite good.

Geoffrey pauses on the threshold. Something moves in him: the closing loop of déjà vu.

“Oliver told you that,” he says. He tries to think of it, and then he remembers: Oliver’s look of interest, those months ago after the radio interview, and how he said, _I know he’s your friend and I’m sure you went at it like rabbits back at Wittenberg...._ Except Oliver must have known they didn’t, because not so long after university was the first time Geoffrey worked with Oliver, and not so long after that was when Geoffrey got Oliver to put Ben in his third _Midsummer Night’s Dream_. Who knows what Ben said about it all, about living with Geoffrey in that university apartment for two years, in those private note sessions with Oliver.

Then Geoffrey remembers that day when Ben came to their house, his and Ellen’s, after rehearsal, and said, _Why not go all the way and let Hamlet be in love with Horatio?_ It had made everything strange, but only now does Geoffrey see the dropped stitch at the center of it all, concealed by the shock of the moment: that wasn’t something Ben would ask. To ask for anything, to insert himself—it’s out of character, because if in two years in Toronto with only a wall between them Ben never asked, he was never going to ask; and moreover it’s out of _character_ , because Ben was born to play Horatio.

He shouldn’t have asked, logically, because he had no reason to expect anything. Unless. Unless—

“Why did you come?” Geoffrey asks softly.

“I wanted to talk to you,” says Ben.

“No,” says Geoffrey. “Here. For this play.”

Ben glances at him without comprehension. “Well, god, because it’s New Burbage’s _Hamlet_.” Geoffrey just looks at him. “What, that’s not _enough_? What do you want me to say, Geoffrey? A truant disposition. A preference for kitschy backwater towns over major cultural centers like Montreal. Because I was bored. Because you asked me to.”

“ _Oliver_ asked you to,” says Geoffrey.

Ben smiles with half his mouth. “I’m not an idiot, Geoffrey. Oliver hated my Hamlet.”

“Oliver asked you to,” says Geoffrey.

—Ben wouldn’t have asked, unless his director gave him directions. _I don’t want a boring_ Hamlet. Or maybe something subtler, maybe just… expectations, a planted seed. He wouldn’t have asked unless Oliver said, sometime in the early days, or even when he called Ben up the first time: _I’m thinking maybe we’ll play with the idea of the Hamlet-Horatio subtext. If you’re interested. Why don’t you think on it._

“You were sent for,” says Geoffrey.

Though there is no such confession in Ben’s looks. “This play is making you paranoid,” he says. He gets out of the chair and takes a step toward Geoffrey, hands out. “I don’t know what you’re asking me, but I d-didn't— when I came, I d-d-d—”

Detachedly, in another part of himself, Geoffrey recalls the first time this happened to Ben onstage. Opening night in Ottawa. Geoffrey was watching from the wings—Horatio not needed again until the next scene—as Polonius and Claudius exited, clearing the stage for the moment of truth. Three-One. Ben had done it just fine in rehearsals; he wasn’t a Hamlet for the ages, but he could carry the language. And then he entered on opening night, in black out of the black, and stood staring. Geoffrey followed his gaze, over the heads of the audience into the back of the theater, but there was nothing there. Geoffrey never asked what Ben saw, but now, coming up on his own third night, he thinks quite possibly it was just that: nothing. The darkness beyond the little light they made. It wasn’t the idea of the soliloquy itself that intimidated Ben; some actors had problems with that, but not him. It was the darkness and silence of the surrounding play, no words sufficient to fill it. It was never the speeches that were too big. Anyway, that’s what Geoffrey thinks now, remembering how when Ben opened his mouth he couldn’t get past “To b—” for a paralyzingly long time.

Maybe it’s because Geoffrey has already gotten through it twice that the memory doesn’t arouse any sympathy in him. Instead he thinks, _If you can’t even get the question out on your own, you don’t deserve the answer_. And he says, with a fleeting cruelty that surprises even him, “Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounced it to you, trippingly on the tongue."

Ben closes his mouth and looks at him, white and miserable. Finally, he says, “Do you want me to leave?”

“Yes,” says Geoffrey.

“The room,” says Ben. “Leave the room. I don’t know what you think, Geoffrey, and I don’t know why, but I won’t… leave the _show_. No matter how much that company kid who’s playing Reynaldo wants my place. Everything else aside, this show means a lot to me, and I intend to stay for every day of its long and celebrated run.” He pauses, as if waiting for something. Geoffrey doesn’t give it. “You w-wanted me to come,” he says, “and I came. I wouldn’t fuck you over.” And he goes.

In his wake, Geoffrey wanders across the room and sits in Ellen’s chair. For once he’s not thinking of anything. He doesn’t look in the mirror. He looks at the clock: it’s been more than five minutes. It’s been ten. The show goes on, again, in five. It’s very, very quiet, and he sits receptive and vacant, his face raised expectantly toward the door, waiting for Ellen to come and fill him up again.

***

**EXCERPTED TRANSCRIPT OF 02/06/89 CFRA RADIO BROADCAST [TAPE WATER-DAMAGED]:**

**ROONEY:** For those of you who are just joining us, we’re here with Ben Ross and Geoffrey Tennant from the True North Theatre Festival’s _Hamlet_ , opening next week. Now, you’re both fairly young to be doing this show—  
 **TENNANT** [ _laughing_ ] **:** Well, not _that_ young, don’t frighten everyone off. We’re old before our time; _Hamlet_ does that to you. Yourself, ma’am, should be old as I am, if like a crab you could go backward.  
 **ROSS:** That’s my line, you shit. But no, you’re right, Betty, it’s a youthful _Hamlet_ all round, and actually I think that’s going to be one of its strengths.  
 **TENNANT:** He’s trying to say diplomatically that he finds it embarrassing when actors old enough to be your father are still creaking through the part.  
 **ROSS:** I’m trying to say _anything_ over your obsessive love of the sound of your own voice. [ _Laughter._ ] Well. Yes. In defence of the old men with grey beards and weak hams, though, age is a slippery concept in this play anyway. I mean, Hamlet is a student at Wittenberg going through what many see as a typical adolescent crisis—writ very, very large, of course—and yet if we believe the text—  
 **TENNANT:** That’s a radical leap of faith you’re making there, Ben—  
 **ROSS:** Shut up. If we believe the text, he’s thirty years old. In any case, I really do hope no one will quibble with my casting, because I happen to be thirty myself. As is Geoffrey, actually, who’s playing my schoolmate. So as _Hamlet_ s go, this one makes about as much chronological sense as you can hope for.  
 **ROONEY:** I’m glad you brought that up, because this is interesting—you and Geoffrey knew each other before the play, didn’t you, because in real life you were friends at university?  
 **ROSS:** “Friends” may be overstating the case.  
 **TENNANT:** Now he’s taking his revenge for all my smartass comments. Hamlet’s getting to him. Yes, we went to York together. We actually met in our second year, in _Twelfth Night_. Antonio and Sebastian.  
 **ROONEY:** And now Hamlet and Horatio. As you approach opening, what speeches are you thinking of most? Which are your personal favorites? Geoffrey?  
 **TENNANT:** Oh, it would have to be… “Not a whit, we defy augury: there's a special / providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, / 'tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be / now; if it be not now, yet it will come: the / readiness is all: since no man has aught of what he / leaves, what is't to leave betimes? Let be."  
 **ROONEY:** Oh. Lovely. Not one of yours, though.  
 **TENNANT:** No. One of his.  
 **ROONEY:** Ben?  
 **ROSS** [ _clearing his throat_ ] **:** I see, the gimmick is we’re supposed to do each other’s speeches.  
 **TENNANT:** Just staying in character. Being selfless.  
 **ROSS:** In that case I’m going to have to stick with one of mine, because I’m supposed to have the definitive, all-encompassing self here. Sorry, Geoff. I do—I do, though, quite like this one of Hamlet’s _to_ Horatio. Um. "Dost thou hear? / Since my dear soul was mistress of her choice / And could of men distinguish, her election / Hath seal'd thee for herself; for thou hast been / As one, in suffering all, that suffers nothing, / A man that fortune's buffets and rewards / Hast ta'en with equal thanks: and blest are those / Whose blood and judgment are so well commingled, / That they are not a pipe for fortune's finger / To sound what stop she please. Give me that man / That is not passion's slave, and I will [. . . .]"  
[ _The rest is garbled._ ]


End file.
